Abstract:

One of the objectives of the European Higher Education Area [1] is the promotion of collaborative and informal learning through the implementation of educational practices. 3D virtual environments become an ideal space for such activities. On the other hand, the problem of financing in Spanish universities has led to the search for new ways to optimize available resources.

The Technical University of Madrid requires the use of laboratories which due to their dangerousness, duration or control of the developed processes are difficult to perform in real life. For this reason, we have developed several 3D laboratories in virtual environment. The laboratories are built on open source platform OpenSim [2].

In this paper it is exposed the use of the OpenSim platform for these new teaching experiences and the new design of the software architecture. This architecture requires the adaptation of the platform to the needs of the users and the different laboratories of our University.

We will explain the structure of the implemented architecture and the process of creating and configuring it. The proposed architecture is decentralized, each laboratory is housed in a different educational center.

The architecture adds several services, among others, the creation and management of users automated, communication between external services and platforms in different program languages. Therefore, we achieve improving the user experience and rising the functionalities of laboratories.

References:
[1] http://www.ehea.info/
[2] http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Keywords:

OpenSim, Virtual Lab, Software architecture, 3D application.